A photograph of your apartment key is enough to enable someone to unlock your door, thanks to a new technology developed by computer scientists at UC San Diego.
Led by computer science professor Stefan Savage, a group of students devised a way for a computer program to create a duplicate of a key by simply analyzing a photograph of it. Each bump and valley on a key represents a numeric code, which completely describes how to open any lock, according to UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering publication.
The team demonstrated the software at ACM’s Conference on Communications and Computer Security 2008, where students showed off the technique up close and from afar. They took close-up shots of keys with a cell phone camera. Then, using a 5-inch telephoto lens, they stood on top of a building and took photos of keys sitting on a table 200 feet away. In both examples, they were able to capture sufficient data to create duplicate keys.
As neat as the technique sounds, the computer scientists are aware it will instill fear in those who have posted photos of their keys on public photo sites such as Flickr. However, Savage says for quite some time, some expert locksmiths have been able to copy keys by hand from looking at high-resolution photos. The computer scientists’ project would simply enable anybody with the software to do the same.
To address the concern, some companies are developing keys that contain computer chips, so they’d need to both physically fit the lock and send the proper code to open it.
